Unusual engagement photo gets play in Lincoln Journal Star

Last Updated on Friday, 23 August 2013 14:45
Written by Elizabeth Barrett
Friday, 23 August 2013 13:48

Gothenburg graduate Levi Peters featured with finance.

Editor’s note: Cindy Lange-Kubick, the Lincoln Life columnist for the Lincoln Journal Star, wrote this piece which appeared in the July 30 issue of the newspaper.

Four days later, on Saturday, Aug. 3, Peters and Meyers married.

In their engagement photo—in Sunday’s Lincoln Journal Star—Levi Peters is holding a pipe and reading the paper while his fiancee, Jayne Meyer stands in the kitchen, glaring over a mixing bowl.

Lincoln Life forgives Peters for using the Omaha World-Herald as a prop—and gives props to the couple and their photographer for taking liberties with the traditional we’re-happy-to-announce-our-wedding portrait.

Not that those aren’t nice, too. But the Lincoln couple—he’s originally from Gothenburg, she grew up in Seward—who met at a New Year’s Eve party two years ago and will be married Saturday wanted to stir things up.

“We knew we wanted to do something different,” said Meyer, 26, a dietician who loves to cook but isn’t stuck in the kitchen. “Maybe what you’d think an old married couple would be doing.”

That’s when photographer Grace Young—who happens to be Meyer’s maid-of-honor and whose day job is managing the studio for a photographer who happened to own an old farmhouse—suggested a photo shoot in the country.

“I was trying to come up with the stereotypical idea of a marriage and take that to the extreme and really exaggerate it,” said Young, who calls the couple “laid-back, fun and definitely non-traditional.”

Young took American Gothic pictures in front of the two-story clapboard house. And more photos in the living room, under a stuffed moose head hanging on the wall. And photos in the barn, dancing.

And photos in the kitchen. Peters sitting at the table covered in a red-checked tablecloth, Meyer with the mixing bowl. And then Meyer at the table with a glass of wine, Peters in the background, perhaps barefoot and pregnant.

The couple loved how they turned out. And in the end, they loved the pipe-smoking Peters, glaring Meyer pic the best.

And so does everyone else who’s seen it. (Well, except for Meyer’s grandma who said, “You’re not putting that in the paper, are you?”)

“Everyone felt it really matched our personalities,” said Meyer.

“People (are) getting a big kick out of it,” said Peters, 26, a digital producer for Schaefer’s. “It’s not the normal, ‘Here’s the happy couple.’”

Not that they’re not happy.

And they are looking forward to being an old married couple together.

Just not quite yet.

Although Meyer does own an apron. And the pipe does actually belong to Peters.

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